But this year, for those who depend on the silvery Chinook salmon — the highly sought “wild king” salmon in grocery stores — pulling anything from the ocean may prove impossible.

Federal managers are poised to sharply restrict a 700-mile stretch of the Pacific Ocean to Chinook fishing to protect weak Klamath River runs — an unprecedented restriction that, fishers warn, will force some boat owners to take risks in unfamiliar fisheries with potentially fatal results.

“The prospect of significant economic and social disruption along the coast is in front of us,” said Jason Peltier, deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Most frustrating to fishers is that their boats will be sitting idle as one of the more plentiful Sacramento River Chinook runs in modern history makes its way through the Golden Gate. But because Klamath and Sacramento stocks co-mingle in the ocean, federal managers are placing the whole coast off-limits to be safe.

And it is those federal managers who are drawing the most flak for destroying the Klamath and threatening an upward of $1 billion industry along the coast.

“The river is killing its young. It’s that simple,” said Duncan MacLean, owner of the Barbara Faye,
who has fished all his life out of this harbor town off Half Moon Bay.

“I don’t see anybody, especially the agency folks (who) are responsible
for it, getting off of their thumbs and doing something about
it.”

For 15 years, MacLean sat on a panel advising fishery managers
how to split the salmon harvest. He
resigned Friday, frustrated with
their inaction in the face of this
year’s crisis.

The Klamath, straddling the
border between Oregon and California,
was once among the most
productive rivers on the West
Coast, with only the Columbia and
Sacramento rivers putting out more
salmon.

“Today it’s just a basket case,”
said Steve Pedery, wildlife advocate
with Oregon Natural Resources
Council. “It’s not that the river has
changed. The folks that manage the
river have made it into this mess.”
Whatever the cause, the result is
that a federal panel overseeing West
Coast fisheries has little choice but
to propose sharp limits on the
Chinook fishery.

Meeting last week in Seattle, the
Pacific Fisheries Management
Council proposed three options for
the Chinook season, which traditionally
opens in late spring:

—Half of the season as 2005, the
most restrictive on record, which
saw no fishing in parts of May and
July and all of June.

—A season offering a quarter of
the amount of fishing as last year’s.

—No fishing for salmon from
Point Sur to near Astoria, Ore.

The third option is the default
option under federal rules, based
on this year’s projections. To have
any fishing, the council would have
to grant an exemption to those
rules, which several on the council
appeared inclined to do last week.

A final recommendation on the
season will not come until next
month, when the council meets in
Sacramento. The National Marine
Fisheries Service and Secretary of
Commerce Carlos Gutierrez have
final say and could override any decision,
be it a full ban or a less restrictive
season.

Things look bleak

By almost any assessment, the
Klamath looks dire. Fisheries managers
want to see a minimum of
35,000 natural fish return from the
ocean to spawn. This year, they predict
less than 30,000 will survive to
return, the third year in a row the
river will have missed its target.

The river is running low, warm
and full of pollution from agricultural
runoff — never conducive to
good salmon growth.

Drought and a fierce water war
scarred the river in 2001; a year
later a massive die-off left some
70,000 Chinook rotting on the
banks before they had a chance to
spawn.

The warm, dirty water enabled a
particularly lethal parasite to
flourish, killing upward of 80 percent
of the juvenile salmon in 2002
and 2003. What survived makes up
this year’s spawning class.

“Anybody who’s spent any time
in the basin knows there’s not a lot
of water coming down the river and
that the quality of the water is terrible,”
said Pedery. “This isn’t a
problem that just appeared a few
weeks ago, when the fishery managers
said, Look, we’re not going to
have enough fish.’

“We’ve known about this decline
for years.”

The Sacramento River, meanwhile,
is booming. Biologists expect
360,000 Chinook to return to
spawn, down from the record
775,500 that returned in 2002 but
well above the 120,000 to 180,000
Chinook that fisheries managers
consider a healthy run.

Yet this is what makes managing
an ocean salmon fishery so complex:
Although salmon return reliably
every year to spawn and die in the
stream where they were born, in the
ocean the only way to tell a Klamath
Chinook from a Sacramento one is
if someone tags one as a yearling in
the hatchery.

Less than 20 percent of hatchery
fish are tagged.

And even if fishers blame juvenile
mortality for the poor runs,
their boats remain the last big obstacle
before the adult Chinook return
to spawn.

So the hammer falls on them.
“Fisheries, for better or worse,
are the last source of mortality before
fish enter the river,” said Michael
Mohr, a biologist who assesses
salmon populations for the
National Marine Fisheries Service.

“It’s either the fisheries, potentially,
or the habitat,” he added in assessing
reasons for the decline. “It
could be anything. But three (bad)
years in a row means we have to
look at this.”

Fish stocks, certainly in the
United States, have a habit of being
overfished, Mohr added. That is
why federal policy forces the agency
to make such restrictive recommendations.

“It’s a checkpoint.”

Living the dream

Out at the Berkeley Marina,
Brian Guiles cuts some new carpet
for his 43-foot charter fishing boat,
the Flying Fish. Deck hand Tom
Bernot squeezes into the engine
compartment to tinker with the
boat’s twin 435-horsepower engine.

“You can’t be tall to do this,”
comes Bernot’s muffled voice from
deep in the boat’s bowels.

For 27 years, Guiles has run
boats full of anglers to the fishing
grounds beyond the Golden Gate,
each customer dreaming of snagging
a sleek silvery Chinook that
can top out at 50 pounds or more.

Guiles cannot survive without
those dreams.

He is spitting mad at the limbo
he now faces. And he places blame
for this mess squarely on the shoulders
of the state and federal managers.

“These people have had years
and years and years to put all the
statistics together and make the
laws for the fishing and do it right.

And they’ve miserably failed,” he
said. “It’s not going to be corrected
by reducing fishing.”

Anywhere else, Guiles added,
they would be fired. Instead, they
will retire on a state pension.

“They ought to be arrested for
resource abuse,” he said. “And it’s
going to cost the entire industry.”

Activists such as Pedery say the
boat owners have a point and have
called on the government to offer
some sort of a bailout, much the
way farmers often receive federal
aid.

That is not going to happen, said
Peltier, the Interior undersecretary.

“Our goal is to clearly recognize
every interest out there and treat
them as equitably as possible,” he
said. “We get it from all sides.
Farmers are upset with us, fishermen
are upset with us.”

Peltier recognizes that Uncle
Sam has become “the punching bag
of the day, day in and day out.”
The federal irrigation district waters
about half of the land in the
basin, yet somehow picks up 100
percent of the heat for water diversions
blamed for lowering the Klamath’s
flows to unhealthy levels,
Peltier said.

Various federal agencies have
spent at least $100 million in the
past few years buying water from
farmers to keep it in the river,
working on efforts to relicense or
remove dams and to further understand
the salmon runs, he said.

Yet a Cabinet-level panel created
by President Bush shortly after the
2001 Klamath water fight to help
coordinate work among agencies
has largely slipped off the radar
screen.

“I have not heard they are still
functioning,” Peltier said. “But certainly
the really important work
goes on here at the headquarters locally
(and), more importantly, at the
field level.”

For fishers facing a savaged
season, none of this offers solace.
“This is probably of zero value to
the salmon fishermen who have
their economic lives on the line
today,” Peltier acknowledged.

“But we do have something unusual
appearing in the Klamath
basin today, and that is good
(spring runoff) conditions.”

Not the first time

The year was 1992. Drought decimated
Sacramento River Chinook
stocks, dropping them to record
lows.

Bill “Sonny” Moss, 65 years old
at the time, was about to sign up for
Social Security and hand his boat
to his son after a lifetime of fishing
out of Fort Bragg.

“They shut the season down.
Now what the hell could you do?”
he recalled. “We had to try to make
it out of this port.”

He and his 43-year-old son, Michael,
saw little option but run for
Dungeness crab in the winter.

A series of winter storms kept
the fleet tied up, but Moss needed
to fetch his pots. At the first promise
of a break in the weather, he
and Michael headed out. The winds
were blowing 10 to 20 knots, with
the forecast calling for them to drop
to 5 to 10 knots.

Instead, they found themselves
cutting through 17-foot seas and
30-knot winds.

Sonny was tired. Maybe it was
the accumulated strain of going fullthrottle
all summer after salmon
and revving up the motor again to
chase crab. Maybe it was just being
65 and in the most dangerous fisheries
in the nation.

Either way, he was not accustomed
to taking a rest when there
was work to be done. But his son
encouraged him.

“We were on the way home. I had
been up since 2 o’clock. I just
dozed off for a little while. Then
things started sliding around out
back and he went out to tie them
down.

“He didn’t want to wake me up.”
That is where Sonny stops. He
does not know what happened next:
A sudden wave, a lurch, a momentary
lapse, and Michael was overboard.
Now 79 and one of the oldest active
commercial fishers on the
coast, Sonny has never forgiven
himself or the regulators who he
says gave him no option but to fish
year-round and cost his son’s life.
“My bitterness comes because
they forced us to do something unnecessary,”
he said.

Every fisher along the coast
knows Sonny’s tale. Down in El
Granada, MacLean, 56, fears he will
be boxed into a similar corner.

“I’ve got lots of skills, but none
of them are marketable. So I’m
going to have to fish,” he said. “It
forces you to make decisions you
otherwise wouldn’t make. And
that’s not right or reasonable.

“No one should have that right
or that control over another person’s
life.”

More information about the Pacific
Fisheries Management Council and the
salmon season can be found at http://www.pcouncil.org.